Night Music

Domino; 2009

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For a film genre that gets so little respect, horror-- especially the grungy, lo-fi, 80s straight-to-video sort-- is a major influence on indie comics and DIY filmmaking at present. Even in music, an entire generation seems to have been introduced to electronics via horror's flea-market musique concrète and perverted keyboard themes-- the knife-on-bone analog scraping and primitive digital squeals heard in TheShining and Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the way John Carpenter managed to sneak proto-techno minimalism into America's drive-ins and living rooms.

I've no idea whether French producer Etienne Jaumet was exposed to these films during his formative years, but while the title of Night Music seems, on first blush, like another limp evocation of techno-cool, I think he's got something more sinister up his sleeve. Jaumet's debut album throbs, groans, and wails with the pants-wetting and sleep-disrupting sonorities of all your horror faves. An occasional cop to placidity and prettiness aside-- the folkie picking that closes his 20-minute opening opus "For Falling Asleep" offers a little light-- this is one creepy album. Even the song titles-- "Mental Vortex", "Through the Strata"-- read like placeholders handed to a composer for the scenes when a possessed Christopher Lee starts spooking English schoolchildren. And it seems like no coincidence that Jaumet got his start in a duo called Zombie Zombie, though his tracks proceed with sequenced dread rather than the lurches and starts of the undead.

Still, plenty of Night Music sounds like pure old-school techno. Listen to the metallic electro-funk percussion of "Entropy"-- that warmly familiar Roland-right-out-of-the-box programming-- or the Vangelis-with-cold-sweats synth arpeggios throughout, and it will be no surprise to learn that Detroit godfather/gadfly Carl Craig midwifed the album. And it's possible to hear honest-to-God influence drawn from all the Krautrock heroes and "serious" composers name-dropped in Jaumet's press materials. "Psychedelic"? Sure, but probably the kind of trip that ends in a locked-ward sanitarium. And I dunno what Domino's PR folks were listening to when they called Night Music "dreamy," but it certainly wasn't the hounds-of-hell strings screaming through "Strata". That was the first tune on Night Music to truly stab me in the ears, jolt me out of passive listening, force me to play it again and again even as it unnerved me. Night Music's rawness-- Jaumet even manages to make a saxophone, that treacly emblem of kitschy synth-pop cocktail bar culture-- sound visceral and disturbing on "At the Crack of Dawn"-- is what separates the album from the glut of 80s jackers. Jaumet is steeped in history, even if it's not necessarily the history his advance notice suggests. But retro sleekness interests him not at all, and in a world of bloodless digital soundscaping, exposing the guts in his machines is why we should be paying attention.